Facebook URL Policy Favors East Coast

Facebook is wading into territory that domain name registrars found themselves in 10 years ago.  Namely, trying to figure out 'who owns a name?'  Some notable examples include:

• J. Crew forced the owner of crew.com to give them the name even though the domain is arguably a generic English word. 
  
• Indian megacorp TaTa successfully sued the owner  (and this was my favorite dispute) of bodacioustatats.com and got the name. 
  

Now these battles over language are being waged in yet another namespace, that of facebook.

As someone who has seen the feeding frenzies that arise from these registration drives I can assure you that we are witnessing the beginning of an arms race.  Once scarcity is introduced into the system people are motivated to build technology, sophisticated back stories and big legal teams to extract the value that scarcity creates.  We'll see that here too. 

That is the big story here but on a more tactical level I was ticked off by their policy of tying registration into time zones.  When I went to facebook today to get my personal username, I got this message:

Photos

Facebook URL Policy Favors East Coast - screen capture

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uploaded by mtippett

I was a bit ticked off (as a West Coaster) to see the bias toward those on the East Coast.  By the time the sun sets on the West, all the good names will be gone.  Pity poor Bob Smith.